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Using data to drive action!

November 23, 2011

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Image from USAID

The 50 countries where CommCare is being used

CRS supports health systems strengthening work in the state of Uttar Pradesh with a mobile health initiative that works with community level maternal and child health workers. These community workers, known as ASHAs, are members of the village where they work and receive small government stipends for doing outreach to pregnant and lactating women. With private funding, CRS created a mobile health tool that puts ICT4D solutions on basic phones. The app prompts ASHAs on what messages to communicate during each visit. The messages are all given from an audio recording and color coded, allowing illiterate ASHAs to follow the standard government curriculum. They record information about each woman’s pregnancy and delivery in the app. Prior to using a mobile device, ASHAs often forgot which messages to deliver at what time, or they gave all pregnancy messages in one sitting, regardless of where a woman was at in her pregnancy.
Here, ASHA Sunita Prajapati, 26, counsels Nirmala Devi, 26 (green sari). This is Nirmala’s second pregnancy.
Sunita is a single mother of a 6-year-old girl, as her husband left when she was pregnant. She lives in her mother’s home. She had completed 12 years of education when she became an ASHA, but with her earnings as a community health worker, she was able to pay her own tuition for a bachelor’s degree (equivalent of an associate’s degree in the U.S.). She saves every rupee she can for her daughter’s education, and she is also responsible for all of the household expenses. She has helped more than 500 pregnant and lactating women since she started working as an ASHA in 2007.

Jonathan Jackson, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Dimagi, USA; Social Entrepreneur at the World Economic Forum – Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, People’s Republic of China 2015. Copyright by World Economic Forum / Sikarin Fon Thanachaiary

Next Steps: The next major milestones for ADM are report standardization and automation. All CommCare projects have slight differences, but the concept of mobile CHWs managing clients and submitting forms remains an underlying congruence. We want to standardize the metrics to enable a level of autonomy. So, we’re currently testing our report prototypes with partners in India, Africa, and the Middle East. Through an iterative process, we have started to refine our prototypes to respond to project manager feedback.

Once we validate our approach, we want to automate it. We plan to automatically generate and disseminate our reports on a weekly and/or monthly basis. To accommodate different goals from project to project, we’ve started designing a user configurable report builder. The report builder is designed around a simplified user interaction and focuses on a low number of inputs about the metrics a particular project manager value’s and associated metric targets.